Comment Re:Why not have a petition for something USEFUL? (Score 4, Interesting) 205
Housing construction: In Europe, current population is either stagnant or shrinking in most countries and the population generally doesn't move around much - it's not entirely uncommon for a family to still be living in the same house their great-great-grandparents moved into during the start of the Industrial Revolution. In America, it's a different story - our population is steadily increasing through a combination of natural birth rates and mild immigration, and our population is arguably one of the most mobile on Earth. Consequently, American housing reflects American needs - it doesn't need to hold up multi-generationally because it won't be in use multi-generationally. It just needs to hold itself together long enough to get the kids into college so the parents can retire into a different, smaller house, preferably one in a warmer climate.
Household appliances: Eh? All the appliances in my apartment are at least a good 15-20 years old and they're holding up okay. Bear in mind here that, if we're going to get serious about energy efficiency, we probably shouldn't be encouraging people to use 50 year old appliances that work "just as well as when they were new".
Cars: You're kidding, right? I've seen European cars. I've owned European cars. There's a reason they're a niche commodity in America - they're expensive and don't hold up nearly as well under American driving conditions as Japanese and (some) American models. Plus, due to the higher concentration of population in Europe, mass transit is used more widely and the road system isn't generally as accommodating as America's - this means that there are a lot of poorer Americans buying cars here that would normally just take a bus or a train in Europe, which means there's a large, paying market of people here that can't afford a C-Class. I'll note that there are several European brands that tried to set up shop here and failed miserably, all with horrific reputations for reliability by the time they were done (anything British, French, and Italian comes to mind, with FIAT doing its best to prove it's learned a thing or two since the last time they were here). Even Volkswagen has a well-deserved reputation for shaky reliability and build quality out here, though I've heard that has as much to do with the price point VW's trying to meet in the US as it does anything else.
Put another way, Americans look at TCO just fine - we're just operating under an entirely different set of parameters than Europeans. Well-built 100-year-old houses are still 100-year-old houses with 100-year-old wiring, 100-year-old plumbing, and 100-year-old room sizes - in our case, we have enough open room and enough money to replace those with newer, better designed houses, and since we know we're just going to replace them again in 25-50 years, we're not going to overbuild them. Similarly, the American definition of a "well built" car is wildly divergent from a European definition - since we practically live in our cars here, we want something that will last 250,000-300,000 miles and/or 10-15 years of constant day-to-day driving first (that's 400,000-500,000 km), we want it to be comfortable to sit in for long periods, and if it can also go around a corner without swaying to-and-fro, so much the better; this, I'll note, is the opposite order of the European definition, which better reflects European needs and conditions. And so on.